Facebook has been a go-to social media platform for marketers and business owners for quite a while, but based on the networks continued page algorithm changes; it may be time to rethink your options.
In no is this post going to imply that you should abandoned Facebook, but I do hope it prompts you to reconsider a thing or two.
The Good
Facebook has an enormous audience, and there’s no arguing with that. It has proven to be a great platform, especially from a targeted advertising perspective, that can easily increase brand engagement and drive sales.
The Bad
It now seems that everyone and their grandmother is on Facebook, literally.
The same goes for businesses.
When you combine the two, individuals and businesses, there are status updates, photos, videos, web links and more being shared left and right.
Facebook understands that this massive wave of content can quickly become a hot mess, which is, to many users frustration, why they have continuously tried to manipulate the news feed.
The Ugly
Facebook has been showing less and less page content in the news feed, but their latest page algorithm update has virtually killed organic content views. Meaning, when you post content on a Facebook page without advertising support, you’ll be lucky if 3% of the page audience sees the content.
Let me spell this out.
Facebook urges you to promote your page with ads so you can proactively grow the audience size. So, you get all excited and find budget to run ads to increase the number of Likes a page has. You share content, people like it, comment on it and share it, and things seem great.
[box]But then, all of the sudden, the switch gets flipped and your engagement rate drops off the face of the earth. [/box]
That’s when you realize you’ve been duped! Facebook convinced you to spend money to build an audience, and now they’ve made it so that the audience you paid to build, or at least a vast majority, will not see your content unless you pay for them to see it.
Essentially, you are paying money to increase audience size, and then you have to pay money so that the audience you previously paid to attract can see the content. That may sound confusing, but read the sentence a few times.
Time to Revisit Your Budget
If you’re currently building a page from scratch, it makes perfect sense to utilize Facebook advertising to grow the page – to a point.
I say “to a point,” because at some point, for those that don’t have an endless budget, you will need to transition from paying to gain audience, to paying to getting your content in front of those that have already liked your page. Sure, you can do both if you have the budget, but that won’t be the case for a ton of businesses.
Allow me to share a couple scenarios with you of how you might handle your budget based on what you’ve read so far. For this example we will use a monthly budget of $1,000.
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- Option 1: Use the full $1,000 of your budget to only advertise to increase page Likes. For this option you understand that you are building audience size, but that a smaller percentage of the audience will see your content.
- Option 2: You could split your budget. $500 to attract new Likes, and $500 to advertise your page content.
- Option 3: Assuming you have increased the number of likes to a reasonable size for you category (be realistic), you could stop advertising to get new likes all together. Sticking with splitting the budget, you could spend $500 to advertise page content, and then take the remaining $500 and shift it to another marketing initiative. As in, move the remaining $500 off Facebook and attract audience/customers elsewhere.
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For established pages, I’m a big fan of Option 3 at the moment. Reason being is that you are able to reach your audience on Facebook, but then use the remaining funds to increase your reach elsewhere.
Again, in no way am I saying abandoned Facebook, but I believe it’s extremely smart to diversify, especially given that Facebook is manipulating the game so much.
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